Government G-Cloud Gets A Boost With First Salesforce Deal

Salesforce has announced its first deal over the G-Cloud having joined in October last year, revealing a sizeable contract with the London Borough of Hounslow Council.

The G-Cloud has received some positive news in the last few weeks, with spend rising above the £25 million mark, and government bodies increasingly placing their faith in the framework. Indeed, Hounslow Council told TechWeekEurope it was planning to use G-Cloud services for almost all of its IT by 2015.

G-Cloud turnaround

The G-Cloud has received plenty of criticism, largely because only a small amount of IT procurement has been done over the platform when compared to the billions spent elsewhere. But things might be turning around with recent deals and a government “cloud first” push.

The deal also hinted Salesforce’s decision to build a data centre on English turf will help it score more contracts with UK government.

Hounslow Council will use a host of Salesforce services as it looks to cope with government cost cuts, including the Service, Sales and Market Clouds, as well as the Force.com platform. It is planning to use apps already on the AppExchange as well as build and contribute its own software.

The authority is hoping to make £600,000 in cost savings this year and it believes the G-Cloud offers it the right procurement model.

“We are looking to buy pretty much all services, including professional services and the products, through the G-Cloud framework,” Anthony Kemp, director of corporate resources for the London Borough of Hounslow, told TechWeek.

“Traditional procurement methods could take nine months or a year before you get the SaaS [software-as-a-service] contract, but with G-Cloud you can get in, try it, buy it, there’s a maximum of two years and if you don’t like it you can come out earlier.

“It is a much more flexible purchasing model for the solutions we’re after.”

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